Rencore: SharePoint Customizations Governed

Matthias Einig, CEO

Many companies customize their SharePoint environments. They invest a lot of money to adjust, integrate, expand, and style it to their needs. More often than not, these customizations are conducted by third parties. That inadvertently raises issues in maintenance, standardization, performance, and security. Solutions that address these challenges are incomplete and few in the industry. As former SharePoint consultants, the founders of Rencore pondered upon the need for a tool that could verify the quality, compliance, and governance of SharePoint customizations. Their efforts paved way for the SharePoint Code Analysis Framework (SPCAF), which is a set of tools that has caught the imagination of the technology community—a must-have for a thriving SharePoint initiative. Available in the form of a product suite, SPCAF today is being widely used as the standard code analysis and code quality tool by many companies including—and advocated by—Microsoft.

What is so special about SPCAF? With the ability to analyze and track key coding aspects such as code quality, code dependencies, and compliance with corporate policies, SPCAF brings transparency in code quality for SharePoint and Office 365 customization. Its holistic approach towards code governance and optimization encompasses code quality analysis, dependency analysis, metrics, inventory, and code migration assessment for SharePoint solution packages (WSPs) to online apps. The powerful analytics engine is designed to check over 800 rules on the code for customization compatibility. While CIOs get general reports on code metrics and dependencies, developers get detailed reports with specific lines of code highlighted. The users get comprehensive information on individual quality rules through a well-defined documentation approach. “With SPCAF, potential risks are easily detectable even before deployment thus speeding up development processes, reducing testing efforts, avoiding unnecessary deployment cycles and optimizing operability,” says Matthias Einig, CEO, Rencore. SPCAF rules can be verified against farm and sandboxed solutions (.wsp), Add-Ins, JavaScript, and PowerShell software components.

The services are delivered through dedicated editions within the SPCAF suite. Developers can implement the Code Check module into their development environments such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code enabling them to analyze their code even before it goes for testing. Software Architects and Quality Managers can avail the Audit & Review module to track the quality of the code coming from both in-house and external developers.

The code is measured against the set standards and dependencies get analyzed for further planning and designing. “SPCAF can be integrated directly with the build environments like Microsoft Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Team Services to automatically enforce customization quality and compliance to organizations’ policies via a central Quality Gate,” says Einig.

Rencore follows Microsoft’s cloud-first approach by diligently setting up an easy onramp for clients to migrate their SharePoint infrastructure to cloud. With its new product, Transformator, slated for release soon, Rencore strives to assist organizations in readying their existing investments in on premises customizations for the cloud and significantly reducing transformation efforts at the same time.

Rencore has recently collaborated with various SharePoint solutions companies such as Acceleratio and Avanade to better help their customers in customizations and transformation projects.

With a workforce comprising of four renowned Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), two Office 365 Dev Patterns & Practices core team members, and a Microsoft Certified Master, Rencore packs more than 100 years of combined Microsoft consulting knowledge into its products, ensuring leading edge solutions for the latest—and even upcoming—Microsoft products. With these capabilities, the company is looking forward to introduce comparable analysis services for the governance and security of Microsoft solutions on cloud. “The label “certified by Rencore” one day will be all you will need to determine the quality of a software or piece of code,” says Einig.